Tuning out noise over airport security anger

A male traveler submits to a full body scan before heading to his flight at Pittsburgh International Airport November 24, 2010. Lines at the airport TSA checkpoints proceeded swiftly despite increased travel during the Thanksgiving holiday. Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

As the Thanksgiving holiday approached, I knew a tidal wave was coming. Right about the time I read variations on the phrase "don't touch my junk" for about the 20th time.

Out of concern for my own sanity, I disconnected. A brain vacation. For four days over the Thanksgiving holiday, there would be no computer, just the sports section of the newspaper, music on the car radio, and nothing but HBO and Turner Classic Movies on TV.

I took these measures to save my eyes, ears and brain from the onslaught of reports about the Transportation Safety Administration rules on full body scanners and the invasive searches required of those who didn't want to go through the machines.

I knew the guy who videotaped himself at the San Diego airport telling security staff "If you touch my junk, I'll have you arrested" was just the start. You didn't have to be a journalism professor to figure that a story mixing terrorism with officially sanctioned groping of private parts had the makings of a media chum bucket.

I'm not immune to such feeding frenzies. I was in San Diego with the media mob last month, interviewing passengers from the crippled cruise ship as if they were akin to survivors of the Titanic. But at least it was a real overblown story. There was a real ship and a real emergency at sea. The airport security frenzy was an overblown virtual story. As David Carr of the New York Times later reported, more than 4,000 twitter posts an hour on the topic were bouncing around the country and there were more than 60 million Google searches on the topic.

Driving a lot of the noise on any issues is something called "search engine optimization," which means using as many words as possible in a story so that it will be picked up by the automated eyeballs of Google and Yahoo! (their exclamation point, not mine). Any time you can have the words "Al Qaeda" and "genitals" in the same story, you've got a goldmine. That leads to more of the same – an echochamber of hyperlinks. Talk radio, always ready to hit the hot button, jumped in to bloviate non-stop against TSA. TV and newspapers followed their leads.

Then came the backlash to the backlash, led by media critic Howard Kurtz of the Daily Beast, who wrote that the hyper-drive on the story maybe had more to do with its hints of sex impropriety than any real mass movement. Everyone knows porn sells.

This created a backlash against the backlash against the backlash, with bloggers claiming Kurtz and other big media dinosaurs were out of tune with America again, missing a populist uprising just as it had missed the Tea Party movement that turned the tide of November's election.

By the time I packed up the car Wednesday, there were reports of a possible nationwide boycott of the machines, and mass refusals to be searched. Congress was considering legislation. There were calls on the web for a National Opt Out Day, encouraging passengers to refuse the scanners and require so many of those touchy-feely inspections that the system would grind to a halt.

That's when I hit my personal pause button. Like 94 percent of Thanksgiving travelers, I was going by car. I opted out on following any more reports on National Opt Out Day.

On Sunday morning, I surfaced again after my self-imposed media blackout. I wasn't surprised to find National Opt Out Day had been a bust. For nearly a decade, we've lived with the rise and fall of terrorist threats and the sometimes incongruous security maze at airports. We pretty much did so again this Thanksgiving. Most people just wanted to get home to grandma's house, not start a revolution.

I'm not dismissing the concerns raised by the new security rules. With the Christmas season coming, there could be more disruption. But frankly when I fired up my computer Sunday afternoon, I could find little on the serious issues raised by the TSA policy over the weekend.

What I did find was a flood of reports of the pornographic "artist" who went through security in just see-through underwear. You Tube featured 17 versions of essentially the same report on the woman who went to LAX in bikini – with one version registering more than 100,000 viewings.

I managed to miss reading and seeing these and the other anecdotal stories during my self-imposed exile during Thanksgiving. Like the leftover turkey in the refrigerator, I claim that I'll get to it eventually. But it will all most likely just end up in the trash.

A male traveler submits to a full body scan before heading to his flight at Pittsburgh International Airport November 24, 2010. Lines at the airport TSA checkpoints proceeded swiftly despite increased travel during the Thanksgiving holiday. Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
A TSA agent keeps a watchful eye on travelers moving through security lines at Pittsburgh International Airport November 24, 2010. Lines at the airport TSA checkpoints proceeded swiftly despite increased travel during the Thanksgiving holiday. Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
A passenger undergoes a pat-down search from a TSA , Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2010, at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in Seattle. ( AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

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